


Frankenstein Boys

by PuppyPoison



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Murder Mystery, Science Fiction, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-09-21 04:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9530660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PuppyPoison/pseuds/PuppyPoison
Summary: Prompto Argentum is a college junior pursuing mortuary science—an unusual major, but one that he excels in. As an orphan, he had to shape his own future and so far has been greatly successful in doing so. He’s never heard the name “Caelum” before, although Senator Caelum has been all over the news lately—especially since his son, Noctis, was found brutally murdered in a local park. Rather than a traditional memorial service, Noctis’s will insisted that his body be donated to science. Unusual, but perhaps noble of the young man. The lab his body lands in just so happens to be at Prompto’s university.Prompto’s never solved a murder mystery before, but he thinks they would be a lot easier to crack if dead bodies could talk. Perhaps…there’s a way to achieve that.(The tags indicate warnings for rape/violence--I'll be providing specific content warnings prior to each chapter. It's pretty much your typical Law and Order SVU stuff.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Thank you for reading the first chapter of what will hopefully be around a fifteen or so chapter fic! 
> 
> \----
> 
> I feel as though my characterization of Prompto may seem…somewhat contrary to how he’s immediately portrayed in the game, but Prompto is clearly shown to be a loner in Brotherhood who had to work hard to develop his bouncy personality that we all know (and love) from the game. If he hadn't had Noctis around him during his grade school years, I feel like Prompto never would've come out of his shell...hence the more reserved personality he has for this fic. Prompto also is a very diligent character, hardworking and dedicated (again, as seen in Brotherhood) and although he says he’s not the smartest, I believe that stems from him having really low self esteem. I wanted to write the more serious, reflective Prompto that we see in the special cutscene where he tells Noctis his feelings…I die…because Prompto is a lot more complex and thoughtful than he initially appears to be.
> 
> \----  
> One of the other main things that led me on track for this fic idea is that Prompto, in canon, is confirmed to have a "mad scientist" for a father (ol' Verstael himself). I will cling to the image of smart, studious Prompto til the day I die because HOW ELSE would he have wound up going to school with Prince Noctis (in canon).
> 
> He's gotta have something good cookin' under that cute little Chocobo fluff hair~
> 
>  
> 
> \----
> 
> I also went on a field trip to a cadaver lab way back when I was in high school for a medical biology class so a lot of my imagery for this fic is inspired by that. Have you ever stuck your hand inside of a dead person? Have you ever held...a BRAIN...?
> 
> Spoiler alert: it's super fucking weird.
> 
>  
> 
> \----  
> As a general warning please be…open minded with my subject matter, I know it’s pushing it a little bit in terms of what’s normal, but! Despite the necrophilia theme and the complication a dead body brings into a fic, there’s no actual corpse fucking...I can't get that weird, haha. That being said, I hope you’ll read and look forward to the rest of the story!
> 
> \----
> 
> (HOPEFULLY I will be updating this weekly on Tuesdays!)

Everyone dies, and everyone dies. Those were the two universal truths, at least described by my mortuary science professor. Most people will tell you taxes are also inevitable, but I can't say I've had much experience with them. Plenty of people avoid them, anyway. I know I haven't paid anything to the government lately. Scholarships are convenient in that sense. A 4.0 was easy enough to maintain in high school, and almost easier in college now that everything monotonous is out of the way. History was never relevant, and English just had too many feelings and vague corners to get caught up in. I myself was a scientist. And scientists didn't have to look in their hearts to know what was going on with the world.

Hearts, themselves, are sort of irrelevant. They're vital organs, certainly, but it's really just the brain stem that matters. The brain stem has all of the signals, all of the signs, everything that makes the heart pump in the first place. You can get a replacement heart. You can get a lung, borrow a kidney from your neighbor, try out a prosthetic leg, you can get your brain cut in half and still be fine. As long as it shaves past the brain stem. Brain trauma may alter your personality a little bit, depending on where you're sliced, but personalities are just a combination of chemicals and signals anyway. 

The elderly asshole under my gloved hands right now hadn't suffered any particular wound to his brain stem, just the curse of old age. And I couldn't blame him. I would want to go, too, if I had been around as long as he had. So many people fear death, but it's really not such a bad thing. It's just closing the book after you read the last chapter. No one else understands, seeing as they never literally pick the brains of the cadavers they lower into the ground. They don't bother to do it figuratively, either. That's the trouble with the elderly. They've seen so many things, read and lived inside of so many stories, but the clock eventually winds down and clicks in time to the scheduled air date of the newest reality TV show. When no one wants to hear them anymore, there isn't really a point. So they just slip away.

I almost had the opposite problem. Everyone wanted to hear from me. An orphan who somehow managed to attend a university and one of the brightest students the university had ever hosted. Mortuary science and biochemistry double major. A stressful courseload, but no one better than me to handle it. Perfect SAT score, recommendations from every high school teacher, valedictorian, honor roll, dean's list, and such a nice young man. I heard that all the time. I was the nicest young man that Insomnia had ever seen, according to everyone who spoke to me more than a half hour. I wasn't particularly nice in my opinion, I was just pleasant. I didn't speak much, which I supposed people must appreciate. I wasn't used to it, honestly. I didn't exactly chat up the dead bodies I was examining. I suppose I was just charming when it mattered. I was decent enough at putting on a bouncy, cheerful, enthusiastic and energetic front, which was probably more than part of the success I’ve had so far.

Well, maybe that wasn't entirely true. The bit about leaving dead bodies alone, at least. I did chat them up, far more extensively than I spoke to my peers. It was lonely in the dissection room, tucked down in the stereotypical university basement--spiders and all. So it at least lightened the mood when I informed old Grandmother Apple (for her oddly round heart) about how I was spraying to keep any pests from bothering her in her sleep, or throwing a joke at Grandpa Glass (for his false eyeball, removed post-mortem) about how we ought to throw a whole lot of spiders in her drawer one day, just to really get things going around here! Of course, I was a crazy, sleep-deprived university student talking to decaying bodies in a basement and anyone who saw my behavior around them would think I was absolutely bats. 

I may be somewhat off, maybe a little lonely, but I was the top student in the program. Both of the programs I was in, actually. They told me I had a great knack for sympathy and an even better knack for science. You could say it traced back to the project I built in elementary school, for that equally stereotypical science fair. Whereas most of the students brought in typical solar system models, I presented a pinned diagram of a dissected cat. It had been a last-minute project, and me and one of my guardians had scraped it off of the side of the road, but that was beside the point. The only thing that was really relevant was that Buster the Tabby had been my first real experience handling death. No one I knew had really ever died. I didn’t have any extended family or grandparents, and my parents were just…gone. No memories, nothing but waking up age six or so in the orphanage, being told I had been “found.” I had to find my way on my own because of that. 

Most people say that in order to go into mortuary science, you had to be some sort of necrophiliac creep, or a skulking old man (see the guy who answers the door in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). Either that, or someone close to you had to have died. But that really wasn't it. So many students make the plan for med school, with the intent of helping the living out. With giving them a hand with all of their cancers, their broken bones, their sinus infections and rotten teeth. The thing they fail to notice, though, is that no matter how many knee reflexes they test or how many prescriptions they dole out, every single one of their patients is going to die. Whether it's on the operating table beneath their hands or at home fifty years later, they're going to go. I can guarantee it. My goal was simply to acknowledge the dead, and maybe provide them with some sort of kindness in the moments after their final moments. The real afterlife, with their sagging bodies laid out under my hands. These hands, in the same latex gloves that those self-righteous doctors wrapped themselves up in, they cared a hell of a lot more than the hands of those doctors. They were only in it for the money. I was trying to give the best treatment I could to cadavers, once they were really faced with their last moments on earth. To make another note, I was going to make the same as any doctor in my future career, and my market was guaranteed to never run out. They might make a cure for cancer, or the common cold, but no one would ever discover immortality. Every future dead uncle was a paycheck in my pocket.

It did sound kind of harsh, when it was put that bluntly. But honestly, everyone was taken advantage in some way or another. Even librarians take advantage of people. They market off the boredom of the masses, and the lonely losers who shuffle through the doors in search of something to immerse themselves in, something that won't talk back. I was in the library at the moment, actually. I had about an hour to kill before class, and I was chipping at the minutes as I picked the paint off of the shelves. The science section wasn't overtly exciting. There were mostly discarded textbooks, things I had already read through my freshman and sophomore years. I picked one up, flipped through it simply for the sake of reminiscing. The pages were blank, a little stained and tattered in some places, but hardly worn at all. The other students didn't take the extensive notes that I did. Perhaps that was part of their problem.

My apartment, off-campus and still covered by my scholarship, was probably the thing I was happiest about in my whole college life. I had no money to speak of and my scholarship had simply covered "housing", but when I complained to a professor about loud roommates (said professor happening to be the head of the science department), some strings were pulled and some arrangements were made for me. It was so valuable for me to be able to study in the best environment possible, after all. Freed from late night booze binges and shrieking harlots, the only thing that ever scraped at my eardrums was the meowing of Lucy, my elderly neighbor's cat. She was a sweetheart. The cat, not my neighbor. Lucy always listened to me, too, and I would have been a veterinarian if it weren't for my oversized heart. As callous as I was talking about human life, the people I dealt with were at least already dead. I didn't have to break any six year old girl's life into pieces by telling her that her puppy died. That was too much. It was far easier to wrap up what was mailed to me in a body bag, sniffing formaldehyde instead of listening to other people sniff into tissues. 

I didn't do well with letting people down. Even now, so as not to let the librarian down, I slid a book over the counter to her. It was some book of theories. Nothing really significant, just something I hadn't read before. I didn't really plan on reading it. It was some radiation theory, and I wasn't much into cancer diagnostics. That's all radiation was good for. The book itself was brown, dingy, battered and tattered. But the librarian seemed almost overenthusiastic that I was checking it out, or at least she did after seeing the name on my library card. I guess she had heard of me, or something. I was always having something written up about me. I didn't really like it, but I kept getting scholarships, so I guess it was a good thing. I smiled at her, told her to have a nice day, and walked out.

Class was starting just as I made it into the mortuary science building, taking my usual seat at the front of the class. My time spent at the library had been a bit too much, it seemed. But the professor just beamed once he saw I was present, his two tufts of white hair seeming to flutter off of his bald head. He was my favorite professor that I had had so far. He had life leaking out of him, whereas most of the professors dealing with this major were solemn and nearly as exciting as the corpses they were dealing with discussing. Biochemistry was more exciting but far less personal, and far more difficult. Really, I was partially succeeding because I, unlike the other students, had a certain knack for deciphering the accents of foreign professors--and believe me, there were plenty. Understanding what the professor was saying tended to be the first battle, and understanding the content was the second.

Professor Bates, however, was witty, understandable, understanding, knowledgeable, and absolutely out of his mind. He introduced us to all the situations we'd never be shown in any other classes, and usually with good reason. Last week, he had presented us with a slideshow of cadavers who had all been in gruesome car accidents, quizzing us on the best way to reconstruct the eyelids of someone who had experienced a rail being driven through their face in the last moments of their life. Dressing corpses was more plastic surgery than science, and with a lot of dress-up involved, too. The worst mark I had received in a lab had been given to me when, during a surprise assignment, we had been made to prepare corpses for a wake and I had mistakenly put a brown-haired mannecorpse in a teal dress. Pink for brunettes. Always pink. I thought it was stupid, as did many others, but these are the tiny tests that make all the difference in the actual field of preparing corpses. The families of the deceased couldn't care less about how you had preserved them, it only really mattered if they looked nice in the coffin.

"Now, this boy, he certainly isn't pretty," Bates began, standing over a large metal container. Wheeled up from the basement, obviously. We were supposed to be moving to specific organ preservation, not to mention the mechanics of salvaging organs for donation, but Bates had announced that he had an interruption. Today would be a cadaver examination day, and most of the class groaned. For the major they were going into, so many of them were still painfully squeamish when it came to dead bodies.

"I'm sure you all saw the news last night?" More blank stares, students squirming to avoid eye contact. This time, I was included among them. I did many things, but watching the news was not one of them. I had been working on biochem homework last night, and the local and national news rarely concerned me. I didn't care about the local cats stuck in trees, and I didn't care about any oil spills in the Middle East, the Gulf, wherever. It wasn't my concern. I wasn't ignorant, and I wasn't so far up my own ass so as to be completely unaware of current events. Most of the time, it was just more useful for me to be surrounded by silence. 

"The Bentley Park murder? Senator Caelum’s son turns up in pieces? No?" Bates continued to prove, but the hall remained silent. "Well, to repeat channel six, yesterday morning this young man turned up in pieces in the park. Technically in one piece, but pieces of him were missing. As you can see...." he continued, opening the container with gloved hands (to protect him from the deep freeze corpses were preserved in, as well as any biological hazards) "he is in one piece. Only one piece, though."

Bates hoisted the corpse out of the box, but it was only a head and torso. That's all there was. His arms hadn't been sewn up yet, and roughly severed tendons hung out of them. They weren't arms so much as stumps of shoulders, small pieces of bone showing through the faded meat of his muscles. Both of his arms were hacked off crudely at the shoulders, and his legs severed mid-thigh. He was covered in bruises, and the ones around his neck indicated that at least some strangulation had been involved. I was guessing it was the malicious amputation that had killed him, though. His body was paler than corpses normally were, a symptom of excessive blood loss. It was saying something, to comment on a corpse looking pale.

“Now, this isn’t a normal circumstance, and the family is horrifically upset, but…this boy had an ironclad will, and in it, he specified he wanted his body donated to science, should anything happen to him. Interesting request, I think, but all the better for us! He’s already been sniffed over for data by the authorities, so…here we are!”

Our professor was holding him like a ventriloquist doll, moving the body around so that the head almost seemed to roll on its stiff neck. He held the naked torso around the waist, an easy task. The body was lean, and it had clearly been well nourished while it was still alive. The difference between a structured diet and ramen was always apparent. The slight pudge hanging over my pants in comparison to his protruding ribcage was a clear indication of that—I’d never been able to kick being a chubby kid. His. There I went again, personifying dead bodies. They had at least already been people. Better than those English majors, personifying every blasted tree in every blasted short story they ever picked up. 

It was unusual to see such a young body in our lecture hall. Normally we only worked with the elderly who had faced sudden drops. Occasionally infants who had died at the hospital shortly after their birth, or been stillborn, but those were rare. We got to examine the deformed, abandoned, defective infants born to drug addict mothers. They didn't care what happened to the corpse. Still, they were a minority, and most mothers wanted to both cradle their dead babies and then purchase a tiny tombstone and a plot in the cemetery. Counter-productive. It was foolish to love something you never even got to know. It was like mourning a tapeworm. I wasn't fond of children. I didn't even like examining the infant cadavers. They were too small, and it made them harder to deal with. Better to deal with adults, where you can stick a whole arm in to fish around their wrinkled stomachs.

Young adults were brilliant, though. Having died in their prime, their organs were still ripe and ready for examination (and distribution). That was one of the great parts of autopsies, picking out the parts that can be sent to set on ice and then shoved into some living body. To revive them, and to give them a second chance at life. While they'd all wind up on the table eventually, it was a nice feeling to be able to pick out the parts of the dead that would help the living. It was heart warming. 

I grinned at my own joke, leaning forward to rest my head in my palm. The corpse he was holding up was a pretty one, too. Underneath the bruises and lacerations, his skin was smooth and pale. But maybe that was just because I was used to wrinkles, and used to appreciating the whiteness of corpses. I was starting to look like one myself. I didn't get outdoors much anymore. Given that the murderer had gone to attack every other appendage of the victim, I was surprised he hadn't snipped off the penis. Perhaps that was too low a blow. Or maybe he just hadn't wanted to undress him. It did seem time consuming, fumbling with buttons and zippers when you had a machete in your hand, or whatever. I realized I was staring at the genitalia of a dead twenty-something year old, and shook my head, instead gluing my eyes to Bates's hand as he pointed out certain points on the body.

The clock ticked past the time class was usually dismissed, and all of my classmates were antsy. They wanted to leave. Not only were they suffering anxiety at the thought of being late to whatever obligations they held after this class, whether school, work, or otherwise, but I was guessing most of them were uncomfortable at the sight of a body so close to their own ages. I didn't really understand that sentiment. Everyone was going to die, and once you're dead, it doesn't matter at all. It's sleeping without the dreams. You wouldn't even be conscious to know you were gone, so there was nothing to be missed.

I myself was going to be late to my next class, but I was only mildly irritated. I would be late despite all of the hard work I had put in to the homework assignments, but I'd be fine. When you told another professor that "old man Bates had held you up," they never marked your name with a T in their rosters. Never. Bates was well known on campus for being mildly eccentric, and you could even hear it in his voice. As he shouted my name towards my retreating back, I could certainly hear it.

“Argentum! C'mere, boy!" 

I obeyed, hoisting my backpack over my shoulders and hurrying down to where he was laying the body back down in its case.

"You like this kid, huh?" he grinned toothily at me.

"Er, which one? Are you asking me to tutor someone?" I asked, shifting my backpack. It wouldn't be the first time I had been asked to tutor someone else, and it certainly wouldn't be the first time I had refused. I had no interest in it.

"Naaawh, nawh, you silly boy! This kid!" he said, shaking the body in his hands as he lowered it into the cold metal.

"Oh! Sorry, sorry, wasn't thinking....ah, absolutely! It's...great to see the young ones. We don't get to see them much," I swallowed, unsure where he was headed.

"Aah, I thought you'd appreciate him! Your peers, can't appreciate the nicety of a youngin'. Well, not post mortem. They only like them when they're...grinding, or jerking, or whatever you kids do." He scoffed. I smiled at him before peering over the lid to get a closer look at the body. 

"Well, this guy sure isn't doing any of that," I smiled.

"No, he certainly isn't."

"What exactly happened to him? I mean, they've got the murderer, right?" I leaned across the desk to look at Bates, who was still primping over the body.

"Nope."

"Really? With that much blood, that many parts to discard, not to mention the weapons that must have been used....they really haven't tracked the guy?"

"No fingerprints." Bates sighed.

"Aren't we beyond that? There have to be more tracking mechanisms by now, it's 2012 for God's sake."

"Hush! No God in my halls!" Bates sharply interrupted. I always forgot how staunchly sensitive he was as an atheist. 

"Sorry, sorry..."

"The police are working on it, but they're a load of fat fools."

"Unfortunately." I sighed.

"Unfortunately for Noctis.” Bates said, pushing some hair out of the boy's face. It was clean, someone must've already gotten to washing his body. I wasn't surprised, there had to have been a ton of blood.

“Noctis? That's his name?"

"Yeah. Poor kid barely even had the time to settle into it. He was just twenty.”

"I guess it's at least lucky for him to have croaked before he had to take his first set of college finals." Bates looked up at me, frowning, then burst into a guffaw.

"I guess you're right about that!" he said, patting me on the back before giving me directions as to special assignments for tonight. This wasn't going to be my last interaction with Noctis, for Bates wanted me to work on him tonight. To take special care in examining the details of all his wounds, to write up a good report on him. He whispered that it was for benefit of the police, and I nodded. This was a huge deal. This was actual employment, forensic scientist more than anything else, and Bates was entrusting it to me. It wasn't even my major, and he acknowledged that. But he rubbed my shoulder and told me we were the best that they had. I was the best option. My knees shook at the compliment, not to mention the entanglement. It was a huge deal. I couldn't stop repeating that in my head. At the end though, it was the scientist in me that was turning over my stomach in excitement. I was a scientist, not an investigator. But my white gloves were going to go on at the end of the day and fish around for information. Whether it be academic or prolific, investigative in terms of knowledge or justice, I couldn't wait. Darkness couldn't fall soon enough, and the doors of the university cadaver basement couldn't open to me any sooner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for giving this fic a chance! Comments are much appreciated as I push forward to write the rest of it!
> 
>  
> 
> Also, theme song for this fic:
> 
> "This Song is a Curse" by Frank Iero (from the Frankenweenie movie) (my inspiration isn't subtle) 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoFWHD6hE6I


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings:  
> \--Describes aftermath of extreme violence  
> \--Describes aftermath of rape  
> \--Body horror 
> 
> \----

Biochemistry was flickering from my attention about as quickly as fireflies out of November. The actual month was irrelevant (although it was November) to the fact that this was all so...rudimentary. It was nothing I wasn't already aware of. Electricity as a factor in anatomy was today's topic, and even middle schoolers knew that there was lightning in their veins. Not literally, but the heart pumps out an electrical current in addition to blood. Compare it to plugging in a PlayStation--if you unplug it, the game shoots to black, and if you cut off the electricity in your heart then you will probably black out as well. And by "probably", I guarantee it.

You don't always die, as there was of course the ability to restart hearts. AEDs, or automatic electrical defibrillators, had the ability to bump you back from death. Yes, death. People always refer to it as "unconsciousness" or some other pleasant euphemism, but the fact of the matter is that if you need an electrical current to reboot your heart, you have been dead. Toast. The flat line on the heart monitor goes flat when you stop living, and one zap to bring you back from heaven's gates isn't going to change that you were previously dead. 

That's why I don't believe in God. For one, it doesn't make sense, and for two, if someone brushed Heaven when they brushed death, we'd never have anyone come back. It wouldn't take an electrical current, it'd take a lot of persuasion and probably more guilt-tripping than anything else to lure someone back from paradise. The coaxing, bargaining, manipulating...sounds a lot like the Devil, at least to me. I wasn't sure if the Bible let off hypocrisy or ignorance, but at all of the funeral services I had been to, there had been plenty of both. Tons of shit about lambs and pastures, too. You could really smell that Jesus and his friends had some farm blood in them.

Farms, continuing my train of thought, hosted barns, and barns hosted mice. Mice, also, were sitting in front of all of us. Dead mice. Well, not dead. They were simulated as being dead, having been given a drug to slow down their heart to the point of death. We, then, students who were as much lab rats as were the actual rats, were given the task of reviving them. Electrically, of course. We had been given miniature AEDs, which would mean life or death for a mouse. It wouldn't mean anything but a small shock if we handled it, but we had been given rubber gloves anyway. The department was highly concerned with the safety of their students, as well as avoiding lawsuits. Electricity always had the potential for disaster, and how interesting it was, the tendency of electricity to both snuff out lives and revive them. 

I pressed the small conductor to the torso of the overturned mouse, but nothing happened. I frowned, making a second attempt before checking the pulse of the mouse. As a future mortician, it was important to be very sensitive to even the smallest flicker of a pulse. My desk mate had asked me to show this off earlier, and I had checked his mouse to assure him it was still alive, that he hadn't been landed with a stinker. The stinker had been given to me. This mouse was dead. There were no drugs involved, there was no slow heart beating, no subtle breathing. It was dead. It was a cold, dead mouse. Revival of the absolute dead didn't quite work so well. This mouse was stiff, upon prodding with my finger, which indicated it had been a little dead for a long while.

I contemplated raising my hand to ask for another mouse, but remembered that we were already out of mice. There had been a group of three girls that had needed to share one mouse, which meant there were absolutely none left. My desk partner had already revived his mouse, who was tottering around on the desk. He scooped up the mouse and put it back into a small Tupperware container, the department skipping on proper mouse cages. It was kind of cruel, but better that they extend their lives in a laboratory than get snapped up into the jaws of a snake. Or maybe not.

I shook my head, getting the existential debate of the value of a mouse's life out of my head. This mouse didn't have a life to debate. It was dead. Cold and dead, and I was to be without a lab report if I didn't do something. I was too high on my horse to copy any one else's work, to be honest, and the teacher was too high up on his horse to cut me any slack, or to even provide a make up assignment. He resented how popular I was among the faculty, resented my success. Bates had informed me of this before. I was a favorite of Bates, but the least favorite of my biochem professor. Perhaps it was some sort of jealousy. I wasn't sure. It was a smaller university, so it provided for a small student-faculty ratio and a "personal" environment. This, of course, led to personal relationships and opinions to form, both positive and negative.

Maybe there was still a way to bring this tiny corpse back. I examined the converter, the tiny components that amplified the current and the pieces you were supposed to touch to the body to revive it. The experiment called for 200 on the meter and two outputs to be touching the mouse. If that was to revive it from pseudo-death, then it must be doubled to bring it back from a true death. Didn't that work, along with doubling the number of clips attached to the mouse? And then, to compensate for the approximate time dead...perhaps another fifty volts. Volts used loosely, the true electrical output was irrelevant. Everything was relative, this was merely what the meter said it to be. But the original 200v was merely an x-value, and science is about modification and manipulation. 

I looked up quickly, making sure my professor wasn't nearby, and then quickly fiddled with the dials and switches on the converter. I stuck the four clips onto the mouse, making sure to spread them out evenly, then held my breath and turned the converter on. There was a faint buzzing, and my own heart briefly stopped. I prayed that I wasn't the initiator of an electrical fire. The mouse twitched and convulsed for a few seconds, and I was mesmerized by the jerkings of its tiny body before I got the sense to shut down the electricity. No one around me had noticed my little "experiment", and it seemed like the mouse wasn't noticing, either. It remained still, tiny char marks in its white fur. I chewed the skin off of my bottom lip, cracking my knuckles. It would have ten more seconds before I just gave up, and I wished this little mouse would just...

Squeak.

The mouse squeaked, wrinkling its tiny pink nose, and it rolled over to pad around on its small feet. It was confused, clearly, and I would be just as baffled if I had been zapped back from the dead. I let my lips slide out of my teeth, tasting the metallic blood as I started grinning, letting the mouse crawl over my fingers on the desk. I picked it up gently, hushing it as it squirmed in my hands. Upon examination, it was no different from a normal mouse. It smelled a little singed, but its whiskers twitched and its eyes shone like any other mouse. They were black and wet, and it looked around with normal rodent curiosity. I smirked to myself. Even a dead test subject couldn't stop me. While my professor may not know just how magnificent my success today was, he would at least have to scrawl an A+ on the glowing lab report I was about to write. 

"Take that!" I whispered to the mouse as I set him back in his cage, letting him run around and take a nibble of the first cracker of his new life. Who would've thought things like that could even happen.

\----------

My professor's indirect revenge on me was a heavy load of homework, which I probably wouldn't be dealing with until at least eleven P.M. that night. I had a lot of work to do, more than Bates had even alluded to. I had to dress the corpse (in chemicals, not clothes), and aside from that I had to peer at all of the tiny details of murder on his body, writing them all down in absolute expanded form. I doubted I would be able to get to the whole body today, even though not all of it remained. It was terrible. Absolutely awful, the way people were murdered in such brutal ways. It was primal, offensive, and though I preferred dealing with people who had died of natural causes, murder was always going to be a part of the job.

"Sorry about this," I said politely to the body as I hoisted it out of the container, glad for the multiple layers of clothing I was wearing. It was cold down here. "Cold as a tomb!" I laughed to myself, setting the stiff torso down on the table. "Here you go, I'm not going to add insult to your injury." I told the corpse. Noctis, that was his name. That's what Bates had said, at least, but Bates was all I had to go off of. I laid a towel over his lower half. It was bad enough to be dead, but even worse to have some moron in a lab coat gawking at your junk. I was always courteous with the corpses I had to deal with, covering their bits whenever I wasn't examining that specific area. The old ladies got the best treatment of all, I was absolutely the most sensitive to them. They were modest in their prime, with conservative dresses and small smiles. I afforded them that dignity post-mortem. It was simply the polite thing to do.

"Aw, you poor thing..." I mumbled as I rolled his neck over, looking at the large, meaty bruises that lingered. The shape was difficult to determine, but any moron could tell they were a product of strangulation. No fingerprints, I had been told already. The guy must've used gloves. I frowned, becoming even more upset at the situation. If you were going to kill someone, strangulation was certainly good enough. There was no need to go the extra mile in cutting off someone's goddamn limbs. Just shoot them or something. It was unfair. 

As I wrote down the exact color and size of the bruises, I wondered what kind of a life this guy must have had. He was in community college, and probably working as well. He had probably just been innocently walking home one night, and then this asshole grabbed him and snuffed him out. Gone, taken in his prime. He was a somewhat small boy, it had probably been easy to snatch him, overpower him, and eventually kill him. If only Noctis had been a few inches taller, maybe a little bulkier with muscle mass. Perhaps more height and strength could've kept him alive. He was so thin. Not by any fault of his own, he simply had an obviously slight build. People can’t help the bones they’re born with. It wasn't his fault. Dying hadn't been his fault, either.

His shoulder bones could be seen through the dead tissues that poked out, a few severed arteries hanging out of the place his arms used to extend from. His muscles were shredded, the bone jagged where it had been cut. This was the work of some sort of saw. Knives were clumsy, I supposed. The killer had wanted to be quick and effective. I pushed up the towel on what was left of his lower half to look at where his legs had been removed. There had been a war raged on his thighs, the severing there more sloppy than above. Perhaps the killer had been in a hurry. Noctis had been found in a park at dawn, so the killer must've been skittering out of the sunlight. Figures. Creeps like that always prefer to stay in the dark. 

I sighed, documenting my speculations on the weapon and the realities of the condition he was in. The rest of his body was covered in bruises, indicating there had at least been a struggle. "Good on you, Noct." I whispered, giving his head a pat. He hadn't died completely helpless. In the old days they would've called it a hero's death. There was nothing heroic about this, though. He looked sad. I guess trying to decipher the emotions of corpses was silly. But he did look sad. Whereas the old ladies always look peaceful, Noctis didn't have that at all. He looked like he had had something on his mind before dying. Aside from being murdered. There was the pain there, sure. His face was limp, probably a result of air loss before dismemberment, but underneath there was just something sad. 

But I had to just be overanalyzing it. It was getting late, really late. Documenting all of the wounds on his body was time consuming, and I hadn't even gotten to the really minute pieces yet. I had only been able to skim the surface, but there was a lot of surface to skim. I'd tell Bates I needed some more time, and he'd understand. He hadn't expecting me to finish in one night, anyway. He probably meant for me to examine Noctis over the weekend, and then return with the results. But it was Thursday, and the less time Noctis had to rot, the better. Bodies were better fresher. I couldn't say I didn't feel an obligation to Noctis, as another point. Even though he was dead, I felt like I needed to somehow avenge him. Maybe if I did a really good job with my examination of him, some sort of justice could be served. That would be a suitable means to an end.

"Night…see you tomorrow." I said quietly, wheeling Noctis into the coffin cases where he'd sleep in a deep freeze. I was going home to a nicely heated apartment and a warm drink to keep me up as I did homework through the night. I felt bad. Noctis was dead, but...I felt as if I had been hanging out with someone real. God, I really needed to get out more. I needed some real friends. I couldn't be buddying up with the dead, it just didn't work. But it'd make Noctis feel better. No it wouldn't. He was dead. But I was just doing it to be polite. I did it with all the corpses. 

This is where the problem of being a genius came in. I was alone and fucking nuts.

"Bye, Noctis." I said quickly, cooling at least one half of my conscience before stepping out of the room, locking it tight, and starting on my way home.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter:
> 
> \--Sexual language  
> \--Descriptions of rape   
> \--References to the concept of necrophilia  
> \--Mild violence

I stayed up until about three in the morning. In that time frame, I managed to watch about half of four different horror movies that I really didn't care about. In my profession, they were the worst things in the world. All of those zombie flicks, the "nights of the undead", the "terrors of the grave", and of course Frankenstein, those movies just gave corpses the worst reputation in the world. For one, they fetishized the entire concept of dead bodies. They were either transformed into skulking terrors of the night, or just twisted around to be some super cool thing. From my extensive experience in working with dead bodies, I can tell you one thrilling detail about them: They're dead. Death typically makes things about as interesting as sea slugs, and even those squirmed around once in a while. Corpses were very good at lying very still, and not much else.

Bacteria, powerful little creatures that they are, tend to consistently get overlooked in the whole "zombie craze." Outbreaks are often caused by viruses in those movies, but viruses don't really have an urge to harness the minds of living beings. Viruses aren't technically living themselves. Bacteria, on the other hand, are very much alive. For all we know, there could be super-intelligent bacteria breeding right now, in some government petri dish. Not really. It was far more likely that bacteria would remain underdeveloped, but they at least had the potential, as did parasites. Viruses were the most idiotic explanation available. Even biting was more plausible, because it had root in bacteria. The concept of disease spread by mouth--bacteria. Saliva? Mostly bacteria. But everyone just assumed that there was some magic in the teeth. Magic was stupid. Movies were stupid.

Corpses would never, ever walk, and that was the first and most concrete rule of working with the dead. The people I associated with didn't get chills in graveyards, didn't feel uncomfortable in morgues. It was simply a fact of life, like taking out the trash. Sometimes the trash was of a higher quality, such as the murder case of this Noctis. Noctis Lucis Caelum, the first semi-celebrity corpse I’d ever worked with. But semi-celebrity status didn't keep a body from being trash. We were just the people who took it out. We weren't going to pick up any guns or saddle up any arms in the zombie war, because there was never going to be a zombie war in the first place. It was stupid. Everything was stupid, with the concept of reanimating the dead first on the list.

It wasn't that stupid. No, I didn't just think that. Dead things couldn't come back to life. Period. No matter what had happened with that mouse earlier. No, no. Stop. That is the wrong direction of thoughts to be going in. What I had done with that mouse was a fluke of electricity, and it probably hadn't been that dead to begin with. It wasn't like the mouse had been stiff with the onset of early rodent death or anything. No, it had still been alive, despite all signs of being dead. Just like the other mice. The lab report I had turned in stated that the mouse had been alive, and brought back from induced unconsciousness. Not death. There was a prevalent, significant difference between the two things.

I ignored the tugging feeling in my guts that the mouse had, in fact, been very much dead. I ignored the stupid television in the background, with Frankenstein of all things being played. The number one cliche, the most overdone film out of all of them, the joke I had to hear over and over again more than any other. Calling me the mad scientist, or the evil doctor. I didn't do anything. I just examined. I was a doctor, a garbage man, but I wasn't a "mad scientist." Just because the jerk was wearing the same stupid lab coat that I was shoved into all the time. Just because he was doing the same tricks with electricity that I had spun last night. Just because it was only a matter of voltage that switched things back and forth between the spiritual purgatory and the purgatory of a real life desk job.

No. 

Things didn't come back to life. On principle. And on another principle, I didn't get where I am academically by lying, or cheating on assignments. I wasn't about to begin. I wasn't going to lie and say that something had happened that actually hadn't. None of my lab reports were ever to be besmirched by such falsehoods. I turned off the television, vowing to break the habit of having it on all the time. I needed to go to class soon. I set my empty cereal bowl in the sink, along with the rest of the dirty dishes. I had ran out of clean ones. Cleaning was going to be the only option when I got home the next day, on a Friday night at two or so in the morning. Not for partying, but for more working on Noctis. I had a fantastically exciting life. Who needs beer when you can pick around in cut-up co-eds? I was living the horror movie dream. It was a matter of time before he reanimated himself and gave me a great big thank-you blowjob.

As if that would ever happen. I had never received a blowjob, as a thank you or otherwise. I was twenty years old. I should've had at least three by now. Three was a good, solid number of blowjobs to have under one's belt. Literally, I suppose. Blowjobs tended to happen under the belt. I probably could've pursued relations with any corpse I wanted to, but I really, really did not have a kink for that. It was another stereotype of working in my field, the "necrophiliac" stereotype. However good Mrs. Johnson's brownies may have been while she was still living, I didn't want to take a tour of her "cooled down oven" anymore. It was the part I couldn't understand about necrophiliacs, at all. Dead bodies were freezing, and I didn't always like putting my hands on them for that reason. I couldn't imagine jamming anything else into one. 

No one I knew had ever been caught engaging in relations with a body housed in our "stiff storage". There was the legend of "Kevin back in '99", who had supposedly gone on a sex rampage with every body that came into his hands. It was likely nothing more than urban legend, though. And I certainly wasn't going to be the next urban legend. It would destroy my life, for one, and for two it violated every term of respect I had for the subjects I was working with. It was the same reason I frowned upon graffiti, among other things--mutilation, desecration, destruction of public property--it was nothing more than blatant disrespect. They may be dead now, but they were still people. They had been people, and it was an insult to their memory to treat them as anything otherwise. At least in terms of depraved acts. The fact that they were people didn't keep me from hauling them around like sacks of rice. I also may have dropped a certain Mr. Evans on the floor at one point, earlier in my academic career. But no one knew about that.

The entire concept of avoiding necrophilia, of course, became a little more difficult when there was a penis in your hand. There was definitely a dead penis in my hand when I arrived at the morgue early that morning, aiming to squeeze in some work before going off to class. Noctis's penis, to be specific. I was personally surprised that his murderer had left it intact. The crazy types normally went for chopping off every appendage, but perhaps this killer had been sexually depraved in some way. Maybe an ex-boyfriend who didn't want to destroy former assets, or maybe someone who had molested him in death. There were marks on the dick, bite marks, a few painful looking scrapes. I shuddered at the thought. Genitals were delicate things. Of course, having his arms and legs severed had probably been a lot worse. I made a few notes on the paper, then flipped him over to search his rear. 

His anal cavity was very much scraped up. Clear signs of rape, a struggle, all the usual terrible things. I wrote that down in the file. It would be vital to the investigators. I didn't spend much time in there, more out of sadness than anything else. It was really, really awful. We had murder cases from time to time in our department, but they usually just got passed to professionals. I guess this was what studying was preparing us for--a lot of sad, sad, dead, dead bodies. I wished Noctis was just some dead old grandmother. It surely would've been a better way to go. I wish he had slipped on a puddle and hit his head or something, just not dismemberment, of all things. I tucked him back into his coffin, wondering when we'd receive directions from the family members on how to doctor him up for the funeral. I crossed my fingers that he had family to mourn his loss. Dying all alone was probably the only thing that could make his situation even sadder. 

I locked the door of the morgue behind me, stomping off to another biochem lab. This was my problem. I always got too attached to the bodies I handled. It hurt the worst whenever I was the only one who showed up to the funeral, or one of only a few guests. You saw it most in the really elderly, the ones who had been left by their loved ones (clearly not a mutual love) to rot inside of nursing homes. At least Noctis had a family that loved him. I felt guilty from withholding them, even though it wasn’t my fault. No one can fight with a will, it seems. But at least I might be able to provide his family with some peace of mind and crack the case on who murdered their son. I wished I had a family tie like that. If I died, I knew that no one would care enough to see me off. Maybe Bates, but I didn’t have very many close friends. And of course, I had no family to speak of either. Fortunately, I wasn't planning on throwing myself a funeral anytime soon. But, as Noctis proved, you could never really know when you're going to die.

You could also never really know when you are going to be handed a heap of dead animal in a college laboratory. Judging from the experience that was beginning to pile up, though, I was starting to think it may be a regular occurrence for me. This cat was supposed to be "sedated". We were supposed to work with larger animals, supposed to test electrical shots as a means of revival on something bigger than rats and mice. This cat couldn't be revived. It was as dead as it gets. I sighed, wondering if my teacher just had it out for me. It was my pride versus his, and the brusque way I batted away my deskmate said something about how much pride I had. I was not going to let this asshole win me out. 

Science dictated that things that happen once tend to happen again. If they don't, they're outliers and should not really be acknowledged. I was hoping for that principle, the principle of things happening again to carry through as I hooked the cat up, cranking the voltage even farther past what it had been in reanimating that rat from yesterday. Crossing a set of fingers behind my back, I checked the pulse of the cat to be sure that it was dead and that I wasn't going to kill it in a misguided attempt to bring it back. It was assuredly dead, though. Of course. I took a deep breath and flipped the switch, and after the initial crackle of electricity a shrill, screaming sound filled the room, and I felt a sharp pain in my left hand.

"Shit!" I shouted, with the stares of my classmate and an angry, hissing cat responding to my expletive. My hand was dripping blood from a deep scratch, and I looked down to see a singed, furious animal. The cat was alive. It was angry, but it was alive and well. All of its parts seemed to be in working order, especially as it leaped at me, breaking free from the mechanisms connecting it to the electrical equipment and beginning to rip my jacket apart. My hands were torn up as well, the cat's claws trying to reach past those to get to my face. The animals were supposed to be calm and confused when they were shocked. They weren't supposed to be conscious enough to reach this level of rage or animosity. The cat was finally calmed when the professor ran over and jammed an injection of leftover sedative into its stomach, and the devil on my chest relaxed into a heavy, bloodstained rug.

I pushed myself up, assuring the crowd around me that yes, I was fine. In the meantime I heard my professor on the phone, calling for a cleanup crew to come down immediately. It was due to the biohazard of the spilled blood. Looking at my hands, my chest, they were shredded. I was covered in blood, and it was beginning to dry on the tile around me. I had spilled a few chemicals in classes before, but nothing had ever been this bad. It was the worst accident I had ever been in, bad enough for me to start crying. Of course, I didn't cry. It wasn't like me. I had learned to hold things like that back a long time ago. But this was probably a good enough exception as any. The fact that the cleanup crew also included an ambulance, and also included me sitting through stitches for the rest of the afternoon was probably a good enough reason for me to bawl a little bit.

The cat had managed to get to my face, and my cheek was now held together by surgical thread and taped over with gauze. There were some on my chest (the cat had clawed through my clothes) that hadn't required stitches, but stung all the same. My hands had gotten the worst of it, and they were swollen and hurt more than anything. They were stiff with the way they were wrapped up, and the cuts extended all the way up my forearms. One of the deepest ones went straight through my palm, and the nurse had even looked sad as she told me I had a lot of scars in my future. She had been very sympathetic to me, and was even kind enough to switch the staff television to a channel of my choice as she jammed a rabies shot into my stomach. Just to be safe, she told me. It would've been a lot safer to have just skipped class today.

I had made the necessary phone calls to Bates, telling him I wouldn't be able to come in to look at Noctis tonight. Instead I sat at home transferring my handwritten notes to a word document on my computer. My hands ached as I tapped clumsily at my keyboard, pointer fingers only, and I downed another dose of painkillers. I needed to be conscious to do this work, but I wished that they were strong enough to really knock me out. After all my work was done, I lay on the couch wincing at the television until I was finally able to fall asleep. 

I woke up the next morning to Frankenstein running on the television again, as well as to a very extensive letter of apology from my biochem professor. It was full of masked condescension, but he did give me the courtesy of being excused from the lab write up. It was the least he could do, I suppose. He was probably just trying to dodge a lawsuit. Besides, writing a paper on being clawed by an angry cat probably didn't hold very much scientific merit. I groaned as another wave of pain pulsed through my hands, and in desperation I took a pint of ice cream out of the fridge and held it as I slumped on the couch, staring vacantly at the television as I waited for the cold to hopefully numb the pain.

It was at the part in Frankenstein when the doctor is reanimating the body, working with the lightning provided electricity. I angrily picked up the remote and switched the channel to the news. It was all about the election, and the monotony was comforting. I didn't want to think any more about electricity, I didn't want to think about science, and I especially didn't want to think about how my life was beginning to parallel a stupid movie. Book, originally, I supposed. It just shouldn't make sense. It shouldn't make sense that a stupid burst of lightning would bring someone back. It was just too far fetched. Not only were they coming back, but they appeared to be coming back with souls, too. They didn't moan and groan like the monster in that movie. The rat had been friendly, the cat angry. They were alert, attentive, and fully functioning. That meant something. It meant something very strange was beginning to take place.

Maybe it was miracles, or maybe it was just some strange coincidence. Maybe the atoms of the world were changing, and that's why these new things were becoming possible. Maybe, maybe just perhaps, the same thing could take place with Noctis. If there was any way to solve a crime, that way was to bring back the body. I tried to convince myself that yes, it was for Noctis's dignity, it was for justice, for all of the proper moral reasons. At the same time, though, I couldn't help but wonder. If he had been alone, too, similarly to how I was alone now, then perhaps we could be alone together. In that bizarre sense of attachment, he'd see me as a sort of savior and then want to keep me company. I shook my head. That was the worst thing I had ever thought of. Bringing a dead body back for company? Absolutely pathetic. Twisted, shameful, and pathetic above everything else.

However bad of a thought it may have been, I continued to entertain it in my head for the rest of the weekend. It permeated my dreams and my waking moments, and for the first time in forever, I was plagued with a thought I couldn't shake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! 
> 
> Here is some really nice FFXV art from Twitter!
> 
> (PG13)
> 
> https://twitter.com/missyunfa/status/831380228790378496
> 
>  
> 
> That PROMPTO...I'm dying....I love him....
> 
> What better Valentine to have than a FFXV boy in lingerie, honestly


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
> Some mild body horror/gore

I had just stepped into my normal corner of the morgue, pulling Noctis out of the side lockers, when my beloved Professor Bates came rushing into the room. He was flushed and looked terrified, with terror being the last expression I had ever seen upon my professor's face.

"Prompto." he panted, pushing his glasses up off the sweaty bridge of his nose. "Prompto, we have an emergency."

"What's wrong?" I said, my hands cold. It could be because they were still holding onto the chilled metal of Noctis's locker, but the twisting feeling in my gut indicated something else was stirring.

"Noctis." Bates panted, wringing his hands. "Noctis, he....his...Prompto, we're in deep trouble."

"Noctis is dead." I said slowly, pushing his locker shut again, turning the key in its lock. It could be a quick snap of paranoia, what with all of the creature features I had been watching late at night, but I certainly couldn't handle any sort of zombie happenings at the moment. It was irrational, certainly, but I had never seen Bates in such a panic before.

"Yes, yes, and....his....the man. The man who, who killed him. He..."

"He's here? On campus?" I asked, dropping my clipboard to the floor. 

"No, well...perhaps, but....he left something. He left....god, Prompto, it's grotesque, it's sick, it's....I've never seen anything like it in all the years I've...."

"Professor, what's wrong?"

"They delivered....they delivered his limbs. Mail order, on ice."

"His....his limbs?" I asked incredulously. I couldn't believe it. I had heard of some sick bastards in my time, but never anyone as bad as that.

"They had cut him up but....whoever had done it, they must've....they must've sent back....they're...they've been dusted for prints, they're being inspected now, but....they haven't found anything. It's awful. It's absolutely awful, Prompto."

"They're certainly cocky." I muttered, scraping my fingers over the door to Noctis's temporary lodgings. They had hotels just the same in Japan. The same size as coffins, at least. Maybe not the same in other regards. They called them "capsule hotels," and they were certainly the last place I wanted to stay. With all the bodies I had to deal with, all the time I spent in mortuaries, I didn't want to set the date of my own eventual descent into death (or any sort of mockery of it) anytime sooner than it had to be. "Where...what are we going to do?" 

"We have to....tighten security, tighten it as best we can and....Prompto, I'm not certain of...I don't know if you should hover around here so late at night. He knows, Prompto. He knows we have Noctis, he knows what....he knows what we've got with him. With...with us keeping hold of Noctis, the body....whoever killed him, he knows. And...and I don't know what's going on with him in regards with Noctis. He...he wants something with Noctis."

"Even after he's dead?"

"Especially after he's dead. This must be one of those killers, one of those who obsesses with their victims, who cares about them past the grave and...Prompto, I'm concerned. For the university, for myself, and especially for you. With...with all the time you spend down here, it's not safe. We have to...you need to leave. Or at least have campus security on with you. On, near here at all times."

"No! No, I....I'm fine. Really, I promise. I...he won't come after me," I blurted.

"You have Noctis, though.”

"If he's intent on torment, he doesn't need the actual body for anything. And I'll doubt he knows me, or cares."

"Of course he'll know. And care. He wouldn't have tracked down the body and our address if he hadn't," Bates continued.

"He won't come after me," I said, more firmly. "He won't."

"You don't know that."

"Professor, really. It's fine. I can control it here. I've got it. I don't need anyone else here. I don't need security."

I was being irrational, intensely irrational. I should accept the security, I needed to accept it for the sake of my own neck. Or else, end up like Noctis had. God knows I couldn't have that. God knows I couldn't die, but at the same time, I couldn't have anyone watching over me with Noctis. That was even more irrational of a thought. I was working on my genius status, my self-centered personal initiation into the hero's hall of my own ego, but now I was just turning into a fool. A fool for the sake of protecting Noctis.

Except I wasn't seeking to protect Noctis. I assured Bates of my safety, assured him that I was perfectly alright here, alone. Bates told me to expect Noctis's limbs to be sent down to me later on. He shuddered as he said it, and I couldn't blame him. It was certainly a gruesome thought. I didn't like to think of it myself. But once I laid Noctis back out on the table, taking another long stare at his torso, I couldn't help but wonder what he would look like pieced back together. His mouth was half open, and I thanked God, or whatever master controlled the afterlife, the new innovations in preservation technology, for keeping Noctis looking so alive. I brushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned. I was turning into such a fool, and I wondered if it wasn't merely for the sake of protecting Noctis.

Doting over the dead had never happened to me before. Certainly, romantic affection hadn't been something I'd ever really been plagued with. Crushes were one thing, late night chit-chats with dead grandmothers were another, and now they were starting to coincide in the worst sort of way. I was talking to Noctis nonstop as I finished up the last of my workings on him, and I chewed on my cheek as I talked to him through the night. He was the only one who was really hearing anything regarding my plan. It was foolish, but at least the security cameras wouldn't pick up on anything. Not words, and not anything else. Certainly not, as I had taped over their lenses. I told them it was "offensive to the dead" upon previous questioning of it. They took it easily, quietly. My judgement was figured to be the best. It always was.

 

\------

That judgement led me to open the package containing Noctis's legs (and one arm) two days later. Bates had slightly misinformed me, seeing as all of Noctis hadn't actually been sent back. The right arm was missing, and the thought of whoever had done this to Noctis holding on to that last piece, keeping it in his freezer as if it were a slice of wedding cake made me sick. Not to mention the purposes they might be using it for. With the way they had mutilated, murdered, sodomized Noctis, anything was possible. I didn't want to think about it, couldn't deal to think about it. I shook my head and turned back to my work.

Bates had approved this, especially with the way I had phrased it. I had phrased it in several half-formed and even half-hearted ways. I used the excuse that I needed practice in corpse reconstruction, in anatomy and surgery. It really was vital to the profession, and I hardly had any practice, I told him. It would also be better for his family. The fact that we hadn't heard heads or tails from any friends or relatives of Noctis was one I kindly skipped over, and Bates kindly ignored. I had an outdated textbook open beside me, and I was debating purchasing reading glasses. The text was minuscule, and the tiny details I was working on actually executing were even harder to manage. The lights were bright overhead, but the task at hand was still more than beyond me.

No, it wasn't. I was Prompto Argentum, everything else be damned, and I was going to succeed at this experiment. Not experiment, no. Strike that away. It wasn't an experiment, it was a resurrection. I was going to bring Noctis back, and I was going to bring him back as whole as I could manage, starting with reattaching his severed limbs from the holes his killer had left. I threw my instruments aside and stomped off to a stool. 

Who was I kidding? This wasn't going to work. It was completely beyond me, and for all the praise I had received in the past, everything I had built myself up to be, I couldn't handle this. It was impossible. There was no way I would manage to swing this, no way at all. I was a student, for god's sake! If doctors upon doctors hadn't yet managed the act of reanimation yet, then there was no blasted way I was going to swing it. A few coincidences with cats and rats were just that. Coincidences. 

I was a moron. This wouldn't work, it would never work. To prove this point to myself, I stalked over to Noctis, slapping all the necessary wires and connections into him where need be. All the metal in all the magic places. That being said, I went over and pulled the switch, the great generator lever that powered the building. I may be closer linked to the medical side of science, but I wasn't abysmal when it came to mechanics, electricity and the like. I was more than capable of modifying a fuse box where changes needed to occur. 

I heard the heavy crackle of electricity, and the lights flickered and heaved above me as I heard sizzling and the burning smell of flesh infiltrated my nostrils. The power surged before the room went dark, and I swore over and over. It hadn't worked, go figure it hadn't worked. I reached for the flashlight I had shoved in my back pocket (just in case), and switched it on, shining it over at the table Noctis was still sprawled out on, one leg half attached while the others sat safely in the freezer. The other leg and arm, at least. I sighed, staring at his very much dead body for a minute before going over to fiddle with the fuse breaker, removing my previous modifications of the system to return the lights, the electricity back to normal.

I went over to sit by Noctis again, rubbing at my eyes. It was three was the morning, and I was exhausted. No wonder none of this had worked. I couldn't even focus well enough to keep my eyes open. Pathetic. Noctis's left leg was only half dangling by a few nerves and cords I had managed to reproduce. This was a stupid idea. A fat, dead, bleeding, stupid idea. And stupid on me for ever believing it to work. Bringing a human back from the dead. There was no way it would work.

I picked Noctis up, slinging him over my shoulder, careful to mind the leg I had half sewn back on. I laid him down in his sliding bunk, tucking a blanket over his body. He fit a bit better in the box now, although he was still small. His torso was small enough that I hadn't expected him to have freakishly long legs, but having the actual limbs here certainly did make for a better picture of Noctis while living--as opposed to the picture of Noctis while dead.

I wondered if we would have even been friends. Noctis while dead was one thing, and just the same as anyone else while dead. He'd listen to me forever, and never think heads or tails of anything I said. Never think at all, really, but that was a different matter. It was pathetic, the fact that I was seeking out a dead body for companionship. The fact that I was bringing him back--well, attempting--didn't say much for my social skills. I ought to just join a club. It would be a better use of time than poking around in dead hips until the crack of dawn.

That sentence wasn't phrased well. God, it certainly wasn't. I wasn't seeking Noctis for sex, of all things, absolutely not. He was good-looking, for a corpse, but that said more than enough. For a corpse, a corpse. I wouldn't be able to bring him back, and if I did then I was no better than the one who had put him in the ground in the first place. That man had taken advantage of Noctis, and my designs to do so were no better. Worse. Worse than anything. I was violating the very first rule of mortuary science, the rule engraved on every tombstone. 

"Rest in peace."

So much for that. So much for that concept, with what I was attempting to do with Noctis. I muttered apologies to him, muttered goodnights, muttered paragraphs of self-loathing to myself as I drove back to my apartment. I was exhausted. I couldn't even make up a dish of pre-packaged food to nibble upon before I passed out on my sofa, in front of who knows what on the television. I pulled my knees to my chest, squinting my eyes tight to get some much-needed sleep.

——

Sleep didn't come easily, and my alarm went off just three hours later. I rubbed my eyes blearily, went to class with just the same lack of interest. I didn't go to the morgue today, I was exhausted. A tired, worthless academic, and ten cups of coffee couldn't help it. I wasn't any better than the rest around me. The point of being blessed with excessive intelligence was to employ it towards the extraordinary. If I couldn't do that, there was no point in the test scores, the GPA, the scholarships. I was of no use in existing if not to change it, to do something really vicious with my mind. Vicious not inside of the cruel intention, but the positive. To change it for the better, to do something fascinating and amazing.

I was even more pathetic in hoping this worked out. Not even for publication purposes. Not for a renowned experiment, for a place in a medical journal, or a prize, but simply to solve my own loneliness. That was unforgivably pathetic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's it like being able to sleep easily/at a normal time? Me and Prompto have no clue :')


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings for this chapter, but AAAAH this is a big one! Read and enjoy!

Giving up would’ve been easy. Wouldn’t it? To politely resign myself to the fact that dead things didn’t come back, to blow of the mice and cats like the anomalies they were. But as a scientist, I couldn’t shake the belief that anomalies were just coincidences, that they were simple mishaps, that they were anything but clues. A clue sounds weak, like it would do next to nothing, but a clue is what leads to the greatest discovery. A footprint in a fossil, a misplaced gene, a cancer cell, an outlier in a spread of data. Discoveries weren’t made by stacking together more of the same. They were made by pulling out the little details, the small things that just didn’t seem right. Those were what moved the world forward.

I had moved forward in stitching Noctis back together, while also probably moving forward in my eventual admittance to a nuthouse. I couldn’t help but hum, or sing, or talk aloud as I worked though. If anything, it was a safeguard against the terrors I couldn’t help but be gripped in when I heard a bump, a creak, any kind of strange noise ring out in the dark, empty room. As terrifying as it was at some points, I still pushed forward. Sleepless night after sleepless night had proved their worth, without a doubt. Now, Noctis had progressed beyond just a stump of a person, and was almost back together again. Like assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a person, all the nerves, the arteries, every cable that assembled a human skyscraper had been reconnected and soldered back into what it had been before.

If I were an artist, it would’ve been called a masterpiece.

The nights down there were cold, dark, and lonely, but they were balanced by my days in the animal research lab. Enamored by the anomaly of my rat brought back from the dead, I had started putting rat after rat down and bringing them back to life on a daily basis. They went down humanely, of course. With each zap that brought them back from the beyond, squeaking to life again after ten minutes, two hours, five days, I was starting to feel more confident. With each hair that prickled on the back of my neck, a new hope sprung up inside of me. This was possible. It was working.

The last rat I worked with, however, was put down far less humanely than the others. Every minute of it was painful for me to carry out, but I bit my tongue and thought of Noctis. With a delicate scalpel, I removed the rat’s four limbs, letting it bleed out on the table. It writhed and squealed in agony before finally giving up, hyperventilating until death took the last breath from its lungs. I set aside the four tiny legs in a container, placing the rat beside them. And waited. 

I waited, waited, and waited.

It was profoundly difficult to go days on end without knowing, but I was at least distracted by the continued work there was to do in re-assembling Noctis. I couldn’t help but Google the boy that once was, scrolling through press release after press release. Apparently the Senator and his family had been liked by all, with the father being a truly good politician that genuinely cared for the wellbeing of those he represented. A refreshing change. I assumed that his son would’ve taken after him.

Noctis was the same age as me, incidentally. He had been attending the ritzier private college down the way from here, one I was accepted into but politely rejected due to their lack of a mortuary science major. Perhaps if I had gone there and pursued something like chemical engineering, I would’ve studied aside Noctis when he still had the brain activity and beating heart required to study. Every day that I worked assembling him, I wondered more and more about what he would have been like. I didn’t really have friends, but maybe Noctis could’ve been my first. Who knows.

I knew, though, that the moral and ethical implications of that thought were painfully problematic. To bring someone back from the grave just to placate my own loneliness? That was absolutely not the right path to go down. If I wanted a friend, I needed to join a club or a study group. Not destroy the laws of nature. Yet,I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop the drive inside of me, gnawing away to right this wrong and to return Noctis to his family. They loved him. They were entitled to him, more than anyone else. With that logic, with that moral behind me, I could justify the actions I planned to take.

Taking a deep breath, I finally set my most recent rat before me. I had stitched its tiny little legs back on, mimicking the reconstruction I had already performed on Noctis. The electrical current went off, the lights surged, and a familiar burning smell filled the room. It convulsed once, but didn’t revive. I frowned. Maybe there was a certain time limit these things had to be done within. If this rat was expired, Noctis was long past his “revive by” date. Or it could even be the nature of the death—dismemberment carried greater consequences than a heart attack, after all.

I wasn’t the type to let a disappointment catch me, though. I raised the current higher by a notch or two and repeated the process. 

I did this three times.

Four times.

Eight times. 

Twelve times.

And on the 17th try, my rat sprung back to life, flipping over from its back and squeaking in distress, trying to scuttle away on its newly returned limbs. 

So it was possible, I thought as I exhaled at last.

I wrote a note in my journal, and then strode off to prepare Noctis for what would hopefully be the first day in his new life. 

—— 

Unfortunately, Noctis didn’t revive so easily.

I had long since passed seventeen tries, I was pushing sixty by two in the morning. I knew it was too late, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to get this done, I had to bring Noctis back, and I would push myself as far as I could in order to do so. His convulsions were starting to pick up more and more, and one time, perhaps twenty attempts ago, it looked like he really was going to spring back to life. Of course, that clearly wound up wishful thinking. I gripped the cables tighter in my hands, pressing them to Noctis’s body once more, hoping, praying for it to finally work, to finally bring Noctis back.

Even though I was going against God’s will, apparently God listened to my prayers.

Thirty seconds after the shock, Noctis heaved in a huge, deep breath, his eyes snapping open. I screamed, jumping back and dropping the cables on the floor. Noctis started screaming as well, his eyes bugging out in terror as soon as he saw me. He thrashed around, but couldn’t bring himself upright. 

“Who are you?! Where am I?! What…where…what is this?!”

I tried to take in deep breaths, tried to calm myself. I had rehearsed this speech in my head so many times, I had planned what I would say to him over and over again.

“You were dead but I brought you back!” I blurted.

That absolutely had not been what I rehearsed.

“What? Dead?! W-what?! Where am I?! Where did you take me?! This isn’t--this isn’t--!”

“Please! Please, I’m sorry, this is a lab, I’m sorry! I, like I said, you...you were dead! I’m sorry--”

“Dead?! Dead, that doesn’t even make sense! Is this, is this what you, you creeps did? I got kidnapped?! You took me?!”

“No! No, I don’t know--I don’t know who the people who took you were! I promise, you were--I brought you back! Someone else killed you, but I--I brought you back! Please, I’m so sorry, I--”

I was completely out of words. Truly, I hadn’t imagined well enough just how complex Noctis’s thoughts would be once enough. I mentally kicked myself, of course someone dead brought back to life would be confused. Especially given whatever his last memories would have been.

“But how…if I was dead, how did you…how did you bring me back?! Is this a joke?!” he accused, his voice hoarse. “This isn’t even a hospital!”

“Yeah, uh…that’s because it’s a morgue.” I said quietly, nervously crossing my arms as I tried to pick the most cautious words I could. .

“A morgue? Are we at least in like, a hospital basement? Are you a doctor, are you--”

“Nope, we’re at Insomnia State’s Mort Sci lab,” I sighed, wondering just how much of a mistake this was. I was getting more and more anxious by the minute, more fearful, more stressed. “I’m...a student. They gave you to our division to, um...well, as part of your will, they…”

“What the fuck…” Noctis muttered, trying once again in vain to pull himself up to a sitting position. “I’m uh. Cold as shit,” he said, averting his eyes in shame as he settled back against the table. I neglected to think that while corpses don’t require any modesty, people do.

“Oh! Right! Uh, here,” I said, whipping off my lab coat and draping it over Noctis’s body. Opening a cabinet, I dug out a handful of towels, extra lab coats, whatever fabric there was and covered Noctis. He sighed, trying to avoid looking at me. I had my head turned sharply in the opposite direction, biting my lip to avoid making Noctis feel any more uncomfortable than he already did.

“So…what are you? Just a student? Why are you…like, shouldn’t I be buried or something?”

“Buried? Uh, no. Not as a result of your will. They said your body was to be donated to science, and well, you just so happened to end up here. I’m uh….an honor student? I guess? So they were having me do some forensic stuff on you. As well as…uh…putting you back together. Do your legs, then….do they not work?”

Noctis scrunched up his face, visibly straining to activate nerves that were clearly unresponsive. “Nope.”

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Well, it’s bullshit that I’m even here…I never wanted to donate my body to science…what kind of shit is that?”

“Wait…what? It was from your own will, though. That’s what we were told, uh...I mean, your family was upset too, but they figured...it was what you wanted? At least, the news...”

“Nope, that wasn’t me.” he frowned. “You sure you’re not lying to me? That this isn’t some Frankenstein bullshit?”

“Absolutely!” I exclaimed. “Here, here’s my…student ID!” I said, digging it out of my pocket.

Noctis squinted. “Prompto Argentum?”

“Yup, that’s…that’s me.” I said, suddenly flushing in embarrassment. A student ID? Really? Of all the ways to prove an identity. 

“Well, this still doesn’t make any more sense. I knew I got….kidnapped….but…to have wound up dead, and now I’m back again…it doesn’t make any sense. But he!” Noctis said, his face suddenly draining as he once again tried to force himself upright. “He’d know I’m here then!”

“The—?!”

“We have to go!! We have to go, now!” Noctis was panicking, thrashing on the table in a futile attempt to escape on his own.

“Go?! Go where?!”

“Anywhere! Anywhere but here! As soon as possible, hurry!”

I obeyed, panicking myself at Noctis’s urgency. I tied the blankets around him to preserve his modesty, at least as much as possible, and nervously looked around for a cart, a wheelchair, something. That wouldn’t work, though. There was no way, no option except to carry Noctis out myself.

“M-may I?” I stammered, reaching my arms out to pick him up.

“Yeah, yeah, just, come on! Your house or something, just away from here! He can’t know, he can’t…he can’t!” Noctis said, hyperventilating. 

I ran out the door, fleeing to the parking garage under cover of night and looking over my shoulder at every turn. Noctis had his face buried in my chest as I carried him out, firefighter style, and while my heart rate was pounding, my lungs heaving in exhaustion and fear as I sprinted, I could only think about one thing.

Noctis was breathing.

My heart wasn’t the only one beating in fear.

I had succeeded.

And whatever events were waiting for Noctis and I in the future, we were going to be facing them together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun first date ideas: just bring your date back from the fucking dead
> 
> I've been eagerly waiting SO LONG to post the big reveal chapter, things are only going to get deeper from here so buckle your seat belts readers, you're in for a ride


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings for this chapter!

I was on my eighth cup of coffee, and for the first time in my life I was cutting class. I had always been the one to get the perfect attendance awards, all my life, but here I was. Impaired not by illness or accident, but by my own personal choice. There was no way in the world I would’ve chosen class over my apartment today. In my bed, just a few feet away from me in my small studio apartment, was Noctis. Noctis, peacefully sleeping. Noctis, his chest gently rising and falling with each breath he took. Noctis, taking breaths, of all things. I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes off of him. How could I possibly have looked away? A scientific miracle dozed off before me, a body that had been dead and asleep forever now simply taking a nap. He completely eliminated my own need for sleep, miracle that Noctis was. 

It had been another miracle, another force of nature just for me to bring him home. I had always been the type to devote more time to my studies than to the gym, which meant hauling Noctis up had the stairs to my apartment was a profoundly difficult task. He had been able to hold his head up, talking incessantly the whole time we traveled across campus. Noctis wouldn’t stop rambling, seeming like he was speaking gibberish about times, but maintaining his fearful tone throughout. I had laid him down carefully in the backseat, his face terrified as I put him down.

“I…I’ve got you,” I had nervously tried to reassure him as I drove back. As my attention was forced to the road, I heard Noctis suddenly break into sobs. Weakly, again, I tried to placate him, but it did nothing to weaken his cries. He sounded like he was in horrible agony.

The sobs weakened with each mile that ticked by on my odometer, and by the time we arrived Noctis was completely silent again. As I parked and opened the door to the backseat, a bolt of panic struck me. Noctis was still, his eyes shut. I shouted, but he didn’t respond to my cries. It couldn’t be that he was dead, not again, I thought in horror. I hovered over him, my eyes scanning his chest in the darkness, my heart pounding as I put my face close to his. His warm breath hit the side of my cheek and reassured me that he was still alive, at least. Ignoring the ache in my back, I hauled him up to my apartment.

Once we arrived upstairs, I unwrapped the still unconscious Noctis from the miscellaneous fabrics that had insulated him up until this point. Somehow, touching him felt more inappropriate now despite the fact that I had already seen him exposed, touched him exposed without care until this point. Hesitantly, I slid a spare, clean pair of my own boxers up his limp legs, followed by a loose pair of pajama pants. Taking hold of his single arm, I slipped it into the armhole of a shirt and tugged the rest down over Noctis’s chest before gently tucking him into my bed. It probably would have been better to pull the covers up all the way to keep him warmer, but I needed to keep an eye on his breathing. 

Even though hours had passed since I brought him in, I was still so scared. This must be how new parents feel when they bring home a newborn, I thought. Noctis may not have been a newborn baby, but he was certainly reborn. Brought back as fresh and youthful as he was the day he died, here he was again with a second chance. It was unprecedented, the sort of action that would send me far past Nobel Prize, past academic journal, and straight to “godhood,” if that were even possible. No one had been placed there before, but no scientist had ever brought anyone back from the dead either. Until me. Somehow. 

Noctis gently began to stir, to rustle his head around on the pillow where he had been laid down. I tightly gripped my coffee mug, holding my breath as he sighed one of his own. Slowly he opened his eyes, blinking at me before groaning and rolling his head around to look at his new surroundings.

“Where…are we…” 

“My, um. Apartment. Last night you said you wanted to leave the…”

I realized “morgue” may be a poor word to use.

“The…campus.”

“Oh…right. Is he? Is…that man, is he…”

“Does he know you’re here? I mean, of course not, he…well, everyone thinks you’re dead, you know?”

“They were right, weren’t they?” Noctis grumbled, trying and failing to set himself upright. “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t these…” he said, frowning at his one arm.

“I don’t know, I…I’m sorry. I thought I connected them correctly, but…maybe not.” I said nervously.

“Connected them?”

“Yeah, they…they were gone.”

“Gone? Wait...gone? All of them?”

“All of them. It’s why…well, your one arm wasn’t…returned to us.”

“Returned? Wait, returned? What?” Noctis’s eyes were growing wider with fear.

I sighed. If Noctis didn’t know already, this certainly wasn’t going to make him feel any better. He’d been through enough, but there was always more news to make him feel worse. Always. “You…didn’t have any limbs when you were brought to us, and we were told whoever…killed you…hacked them off and kept them. Until, er, he…mailed them to our lab.”

“Wait! So he knows where you are?” Noctis hissed, darting his eyes around the room in panic.

“N-not you or me specifically! Just, the lab, where I am as a student. Because again, your will, it—“

“I never had a will, though…you keep saying that, but...” Noctis muttered, frowning and looking down at his toes, immobile beneath the covers.

“Wait, what?”

“I had never written one. And if I did, being donated to science…I wouldn’t have wanted that. There’s no way, I…I couldn’t do that to my dad, you know? Wait! Wait, my dad, how…how is he?”

“There were, um. Initially a lot of news conferences. But that’s all…kind of died down. It’s mostly been private investigators at this point, they had me because I was helping….you know, contribute to the forensic stuff. Again, honors student or…whatever.”

“But he’s okay though?!”

“Oh...yeah, yeah, he’s definitely okay.” I hadn’t realized that maybe Noctis’s dad could’ve been a target, too.

“Have they found anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing, not as far as I know. But Noctis, uh—now that you’re back, I mean, you can fight your own case, right? So that’s good, you can...you know, justice, right?”

Noctis scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Even I don’t know who did it.”

“You—really?”

“Nope. I was in my bed at Dad’s house, suddenly I wake up in this…place, and…” 

The blood drained from Noctis’s face as he continued.

“Everything hurt so much.” he said, barely audible.

“Noctis, you don’t have to…talk about it, I know it’s…”

“Difficult? Hard? Yeah, no shit,” Noctis laughed bitterly, roughly shaking his head. It seemed as though now he could shake off his vulnerability, unlike last night.. “Too bad even bringing me back can’t do shit for the investigation.”

“I…I see. I’m sorry, Noctis. I…thought, I don’t know, I thought bringing you back would be…justice, or something.”

“I guess not.”

“So uh. Where…where do you want to go now?” I said, trying to change the subject. “I mean, I bet you want to go back to your dad, which I absolutely—“ 

“I…I don’t think so.” 

“You…don’t?”

“I don’t want…I don’t want them to know I’m alive again.”

“Oh. I…I see.”

“The way they…it wasn’t, it wasn’t normal. Not some random killing, they wanted…something, you know? So if they knew I came back, they’ll just…”

“I understand. But…even with added security, you still wouldn’t feel okay? I just….I don’t want….”

“There was a ton of security already, though. That’s the thing.” Noctis frowned. “Dad had gotten…some threats. Before I got taken. These creepy voicemails, some letters, one of them was…poisoned, you know? Anthrax. It was messed up, so you know, they hired a bunch of people. Everything was on lockdown. I even had an escort to class and everywhere else I went. But…guess it didn’t do shit.”

I was silent. Whoever this killer was, they were a lot more powerful than I had initially thought. “So…you want to stay here?”

Noctis nodded.

“You…trust me?” I didn’t say it, but I realized that for all Noctis knew, I could be just another lackey of his killer. It wasn’t out of the question, not by a long shot. I could be a plant, a spy, just a way to suck Noctis back from the dead and into the killer’s hands for more torture.

“Yeah. Something about you, I guess. I dunno, I’m kind of tuned into people I guess. Dad likes it ‘cause I can…uh…could?” Noctis looked confused, unsure about how he should refer to himself. “I could…sense out the scummier politicians he had to deal with. He called me his assistant sometimes.” Noctis smiled painfully.

“It sounds like you and your dad have a really nice relationship.”

“Yeah, we’re pretty close.” Noctis sighed and turned away. “I’ll go to him eventually. I mean….I don’t want to get his hopes up, you know?”

“What…what do you mean?”

“If…this is just temporary.”

Noctis’s words chilled me. I had never thought of that possibility before—that once someone comes back, there’s a time stamp on them until they leave this earth again. My experiments hadn’t covered it, they couldn’t, not when the reanimated rats were tossed into the mix of animals that were tested on, killed, mixed around in the whirl of laboratory classes and impossible to trace. I kicked myself, cursed my enthusiasm to get things done quickly rather than covering all my bases. It wasn’t a problem I had experienced before—not in any of my classes. But my classes had just been things to achieve. I cared, absolutely, but I hadn’t experienced drive like this ever before. This wasn’t hard work, this wasn’t motivation. This was passion. This was the path I would break my back sprinting down, fighting for this cause until I had nothing left.

“I…I don’t think it will be. At least, I hope not.”

“Yeah, but. He already lost me once…probably best not to lose me again, right?”

“Yeah. You’ve got a point.”

Silence fell between us.

“But! Uh, you must be…hungry, right?” It was the logical thing. Noctis wasn’t starved to death, but it was best not to push it.

“Uh. Yeah, actually.”

“Anything you, uh. Want? In particular?” I said as I rose up, setting my empty cup on the counter as I walked into the kitchen. “Maybe just something light? Uh, toast?”

“Yeah, toast is fine,” Noctis said, his small voice having a hard time carrying itself across the room. 

He didn’t say anything as I prepared it for him. I loaded it up with extra butter, brown sugar and cinnamon on top. He probably needed the calories. He wasn’t exactly big in the first place. I took the plate over, setting it on top of Noctis’s chest. Noctis looked at me like an idiot, a sharp glare before I realized my mistake.

“Oh, shit” I swore, hastily picking up the plate and taking the toast in my hand. “Er…here,” I said, averting my eyes as I held the toast in front of Noctis’s mouth. It had to be shameful for him. I know it would’ve been for me.

Noctis sighed, leaning in to take a bite. He slowly worked his way through it, licking his lips as butter dribbled down his chin. He hesitated a little more the closer he got to my fingers, taking smaller and smaller bites until he was able to take the final piece all in one go. It would’ve been weird for him to have to nibble that close to my fingers, so I didn’t blame him for stuffing that big piece in his mouth. I dusted my fingers off quickly and went to put the plate in the sink.

“Um. Something to drink?” Noctis called out over the sound of the running water.

“Oh, sure,” I said, immediately shutting the tap off. “Um. Milk?” I asked, again thinking about what would give him the most calories.

“Milk’s fine.”

This time, I found a straw in one of my drawers, left over from some take out long forgotten. Sticking it in the glass, Noctis and I were both able to relax a little more as he slurped the drink up through the straw. He reached the bottom of the glass relatively quickly, and I went to refill it before he asked for more. Noctis seemed grateful as I came back with the refill, drinking it down just as urgently as he had with the first.

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

“You’re welcome. Um. What else…what else, uh, can I do for you?”

“Uh…I dunno, I guess…well, don’t you have work to do? Or something?”

I shook my head. “Nah, all my classes are…long since over with. It’s getting late.”

“Maybe, uh…just put the TV on?”

“The TV? Oh, uh…well I don’t have cable, just Netflix through my Playstation…”

“That’s fine. Just, watching something is about the only thing I can do, right?”

“I…yeah, I suppose.”

I pulled up Netflix for Noctis, flipping through the available shows until he settled on one. Noctis picked Parks and Recreation, a decision I was thankful for. There were at least eight seasons, if I could remember correctly. It would take a while for Noctis to get through all of it. As the comedy lit up the screen, the TV filling up the dark room, I stepped away from Noctis’s side and set my laptop up at the kitchen counter where I always worked. My textbooks were scattered all over it, piles of papers leaving little space for my computer. 

I heard Noctis laugh from time to time, something I couldn’t be more thankful for as I typed out my apology emails. It was my first unexcused absence ever, and I knew there wouldn’t be consequences, but it was still the thing to do. I sent them and began working on my homework, a bigger backlog than I expected. My eyes ached, but I rubbed at them as long as I could, pushing until the last assignment was done and I could finally stretch out of my chair, wash up and go to bed myself. Noctis had fallen asleep a long time ago, I had turned off the TV and been checking on him every few minutes to make sure he was alright. 

Noctis may have been taking up my bed, but I wasn’t about to move him. Spreading a blanket out on the floor beside my bed, I covered myself up with a second and nestled my head against a wad of laundry. Noctis needed the pillows more than I did, and sleeping on the floor was a small inconvenience. Having a roommate was something I was far from being used to, and as I nodded off to sleep, all I could think about was how strange, but how nice it had been to have someone in the background while I had done my homework. 

I wished that Noctis’s presence was something I could get used to. But maybe what Noctis had said was true.

Maybe it was only temporary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a heads up, I'm going to Nakakon this weekend so my schedule for posting MAY be pushed back a little bit since I won't have my usual time to write on the weekends. Hopefully this won't be the case, but I figured I may as well post a warning...
> 
> This whole week has been so stressful, finishing my panels is a nightmare on top of how busy and chaotic work has been and aaaaaaaaaaugh I'm dying...pretty much....(for ref I work full time AND I got promoted AND I'm training someone new so I have...a lot on my plate!) (especially with TWO PANELS...) (especially when they're BACK TO BACK AND I HAVE TO TALK FOR 3 HOURS STRAIGHT HELP)
> 
> What's great though is that the voice actors for Noctis and Prompto are going to be there, AND I'm cosplaying Prompto with my fiance as Noctis! Literally FFXV con 2k17, it may be stressful but I'm still really looking forward to it :')


	7. Chapter 7

Sometime before my alarm went off, I awoke to Noctis calling my name out.

“Prompto. Prompto. Prompto.”

I sprung awake. Noctis’s tone was urgent, but not panicked. 

“W-what’s wrong?” I said groggily from the floor, rubbing my eyes.

“I…have to go to the bathroom,” Noctis said. His tone was low, and it was clear he didn’t want to have to deal with this topic.

“O-oh, for sure,” I mumbled, pushing myself up and bracing myself as I lifted Noctis and carried him to the bathroom. My arms, my back, every muscle in me ached from having to carry Noctis so long the other day. I pushed through it, though, thinking of how short the distance from here to the bathroom was. It wasn’t terrible. I could do it.

“Ah…here,” I said, unsure of what to do next. Or rather, I knew what was needed, but didn’t want to acknowledge it.

“Please help me.” Noctis asked, quietly. 

I turned my head away as I set him down, clumsily pulling down his pants and letting him settle on the toilet seat. “I’ll, uh…I’ll step out,” I said hastily, making sure Noctis was balanced before closing the door and rushing away from it. 

I went back to the main room and grabbed my cell phone, absently browsing through it until I heard Noctis call for me again. At once, I hurried back to his side, as nervous as I was. I opened the door slowly, avoiding eye contact with Noctis, who had his face aggressively turned away. He was bright red, and I felt horrible as I flushed the toilet. I hated myself for being complicit in making him feel so ashamed.

“I…I’m sorry, let me…” I stuttered, ripping off some toilet paper and bracing my hand on Noctis’s shoulder as I tipped him forward. I had barely touched against his bottom when he screamed and started to thrash against me.

“No! No!” Noctis screamed, shaking his head violently. “No!”

I drew back, horrified. “I’m sorry! I—!”

Noctis didn’t respond, but curled up into himself, making horrible choked wails. He continued to shake his head violently, repeating “no” over and over again until he finally appeared to tire out, his breaths heavy and gasping.

“N-Noctis?” I said hesitantly, once he had become still again.

“I’m sorry,” he said between gritted teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I…” 

I remembered the other detail of Noctis’s assault—the evidence of a brutal rape haunting him inside and out. Since he had been killed, he hadn’t had time to heal. He must still be raw. Horribly, horribly injured, in a way that no amount of stitching could save. 

“I’m so sorry, Noctis.” I whispered.

“Please. Just…get it over with.”

I reached for a washcloth this time instead, soaking it with warm water before slowly, carefully reaching for Noctis again. He hissed and trembled beneath my hands as I cleaned him off, but he didn’t shake as violently as he had before. I heard him sniffling as his shaking started to intensify, and I made my actions as hasty as I could.

“It…it’s okay now,” I said awkwardly as I lifted him into his clothes again.

“Humiliating,” he whispered. I could see his eyes were wet with a new crop of tears, his eyes rough and red from the ones he’d already cried.

“It’s not your fault. Why don’t…why don’t you take a bath? Would that help? You don’t even have to take off your clothes, it’ll be…laundry, right? It’s fine.”

Noctis didn’t reply, only nodded his head.

I set him down so that he would be leaning against the bathroom wall, turning the shower to full blast and letting it heat up. I wouldn’t say it aloud, but I knew that it wouldn’t be possible to actually fill up the tub. There was too much of a risk of Noctis drowning. 

“It’s…you may as well take these off.” Noctis said with a sigh.

“Are…are you sure?”

“I want to actually be clean.”

I quietly complied with Noctis’s request, peeling his layers off as gently as I could and politely averting my eyes the whole time. I set him in the tub as gently as I could, adjusting the shower head to make sure it wasn’t spraying directly in his face. Noctis let out a long, exhausted sigh as he closed his eyes and let the hot water soak him. I had positioned him so that he was able to lean forward and backwards with more ease, and he was slouched heavily into the stream. 

“If you’d like, I can…wash your hair? I don’t—“

“That would be nice. Um. Thank…thank you.” Noctis said, biting his lip as he made eye contact with me. He still looked terrified. I couldn’t blame him.

“You’re welcome,” I said politely, leaning into the tub and loading my hands up with shampoo before starting to scrub at Noctis’s hair. He was tense when I first touched him, but it didn’t take long before he relaxed, sighing and looking at ease for the first time since he’d come back to life. 

“Um, maybe soap too? Please?” he asked as I finished rinsing his hair out.

“Sure, for sure,” I obliged, fetching a clean washcloth. I would have to do some extra laundry, but it was no trouble at all. 

It was strange, running over Noctis with soap and water rather than chemicals. I scrubbed over the nasty stub where his right arm had been removed without a replacement, wincing at how raw the stitches still appeared. It was a real hack job, by all accounts, but I hadn’t had very much to work with. On his left arm, I scrubbed over the stitches where I had reattached his arm. That limp, immobile arm. It felt warm, but like lead in my hand as I lifted it up to access Noctis’s armpit. Maybe it just needed more time, I thought to myself. Maybe the extremities took longer to come back as a general rule. But if the blood was pumping, if the brain was active again, then it should…

“Prompto?” I heard Noctis ask. Snapping back to my senses, I realized I was leaned over in the tub behind Noctis, staring blankly at the tile as sudsy water dripped out of my hand. 

“Sorry, sorry. I spaced out, my bad. I’ll uh, let you rinse off a while more by yourself while I get you some clean clothes.”

Noctis nodded as I left. I picked out more of the same clothes for him, loose and elastic. Although he’d come back from the dead, he was far from being healed. He needed time. Time now that he was back alive, time to knit himself back to a fully functional human being again. It was scary, though. To think that while Noctis was whole again, he was far from being hearty. And me, being who I was, was I even capable of caring for Noctis? Sure, it was his wishes to stay here rather than return to his family, but...it was still a terrifying prospect. Beyond the fact that Noctis’s killer may return from him, I was scared senseless at the idea of being Noctis’s sole caretaker. I had never been saddled with a responsibility like that before. Maybe I shouldn’t have skipped home ec in high school, I thought to myself as a wild throwaway.

As much as it scared me, I didn’t have a choice. I lost that when I chose to bring Noctis back. Noctis had been given even less of a choice than me, after all, so what was I to do? Wallow in my own self-pity? Hardly. I had made a sacrifice for Noctis, and I would see it through to the end. Trying to put on a warm smile, I returned to the bathroom where Noctis was patiently waiting, slumped against the back of the tub as the shower continued to rain over him. 

“Just in time,” he sighed. “I can feel it starting to get cold.”

“Ah, yeah, the plumbing in this building is kinda...old, you know?” I said, carefully toweling Noctis’s back after shutting the water off. “It’s not the nicest, but I think it’s comfortable.”

“Yeah. I didn’t really get the whole...dorm, apartment, whatever.”

“Ah...yeah.” I said, drying Noctis’s hair absent mindedly. It felt natural, somehow, like I could carry out the actions without having to think too hard about them. I could act, sure, but speaking was a lot more difficult. It seemed as though Noctis was having the same problem, as he didn’t speak again through the process of me drying off the rest of him and awkwardly navigating his body into pajamas. 

I returned him to my bed, laying him down gently. He settled against the pillows with a heavy sigh. I had stacked them so he would be propped upright, giving him the best view I could. 

“So...I think I might go to the store for a little bit. Is that, um. Is that okay? Or do you need me to...stay here?”

Noctis’s face flashed with fear, as I expected. “U-uh. I...don’t know how...I don’t, I…”

“It’s okay! It’s okay, I...I was just thinking about getting some things for you. But uh...student Amazon prime, right?”

Noctis furrowed his brows. “What?”

“Free shipping? If you’re a student? Uh…”

“Oh,” he blinked. “I um, just used my dad’s.”

“Oh, right, I guess...I guess you would, yeah.”

I left Noctis’s side to try and search my room for some sort of prop, my heart skipping a triumphant beat as I saw a TV table propped up in a corner. The apartment had come pre-furnished, and while I was never really home enough to notice all the furnishings it had been equipped with, I was extremely thankful for them now. I picked it up and dragged it to Noctis’s bedside, trying to angle it as close to him as possible. Pulling up a chair, I sat beside him and opened up my laptop, setting it on the table and tilting the screen towards Noctis.

“So, uh. Anything in particular you might like?” I asked after logging in to my account. “Food, clothes, uh...just, whatever?”

“Uh. Yeah, some...food is good, I guess. Uh. I dunno, like...chips and stuff…”

“Ok, so chips...um…”

There turned out to be a wide selection of food on Amazon, a lot of it junk food of course. I would hover the mouse over items I thought would interest Noctis, and he would either nod or shake his head. I ordered Pop-Tarts, chips, granola bars, jerky, and a healthy supply of protein powder. Although Noctis didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the nuts and dried fruit I added to the cart, I was firmly set on getting food with at least some nutritional value for him. Throwing some socks and underwear in the cart as well (I didn’t mind sharing most things, but there are limits), I took a deep breath before opening up the screen to pay. While it was a painful sum, it was worth it for Noctis.

“Do you mind if I...um…”

“Hm?”

“Can I look at some sites? On your laptop?” Noctis blurted, seeming embarrassed.

“What? Oh, sure...let me just…”

I closed out of Amazon, opening a new tab for Noctis. Hesitating, rolling his eyes up to the ceiling, he finally asked me to type his name into the search bar. Of course. 

It was going to be a difficult thing. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, seeing articles about how I died. But due to Noctis’s father’s prestige and the extreme circumstances of his death, there were countless news articles written about him. Patiently, I went through each one with Noctis. He only spoke to ask me to scroll, or to click open a new tab. His voice wavered, and I kept as wide of a gap between us as I could, keeping my eyes only on the screen. Noctis’s high school senior photo was reflected in my eyes, a memoriam to the dead youth that sad beside me, breathing heavily as he read the news of his own demise. 

The sun was setting outside by the time we finished. It was a Friday night, and most other people would be headed out to party right now. To get drunk, get loud, and dance all night. That could’ve been Noctis. But instead he was here, immobile in my dingy apartment. I wondered if he hated me for bringing him back. I wondered if his family would, too. Would they think I was holding their son hostage? Would they think I was the one who killed him? Did Noctis, did Noctis really want to be back? I had assumed that, had it been me, I would’ve wanted to be brought back. But not everyone thinks the same as me. Not everyone wants a second chance. 

Not everyone has the opportunity to play God in the first place.

Noctis yawned beside me, his head leaning to one side against the pillows. He looked exhausted. Midway through our reading we’d stopped for a meal, me snacking on crackers as I spoon fed soup to Noctis. He didn’t look particularly enthusiastic about eating, but I wouldn’t either after reading about how I was murdered. 

“Do you want something else to eat?” I asked quietly, closing the laptop shut. Noctis shook his head.

“Bathroom again, I guess.”

We repeated the ritual from before, heads turned away from each other in silence. I set Noctis back in bed with an extra blanket this time, as the apartment had started to chill with nightfall. With the amount I just spent on Amazon, I couldn’t afford to crank up my heat. Noctis yawned again, slouching to one side as his shoulders shuffled, trying to settle into a comfortable spot. I offered to adjust his pillows, but he refused me. It wasn’t very late yet, but Noctis already looked exhausted. The healing process was taking a huge toll on him. 

I silently turned the TV back on, picking up on Netflix where Noctis had left off. Neither of us spoke, and I laid back down on the floor, picking up a book and starting on some assigned readings for the week to come. 

That week came sooner than expected. The weekend went by smoothly enough, with the food and other necessities arriving for Noctis, who seemed a bit more at ease as each day passed. He was eating better, sleeping more soundly, and appeared to be in less pain overall. I quietly worked on my homework, using the syllabus as a guide to complete tasks that were far in the future. I didn’t need to now, but it was a precaution I felt I needed to take. With Noctis here, life had become anything but predictable.

As Sunday reached its close, a day where Noctis had even managed to laugh a couple times, I finally found myself bringing up the dreaded question to him.

“Noctis...I have to go back to class tomorrow. Will you, um. Will you be alright on your own?”

I saw the panic flash before his eyes, although he tried to keep the rest of his face neutral. 

“I, uh. Y-yeah. I’ll be fine.”

“If you, uh. If you log in to my Facebook on my computer, we can message each other that way. I mean, it’ll look like I’m talking to myself, but...it’ll work, right?” I offered.

“I mean...I can’t exactly type back to you though,” Noctis said, looking frustrated.

“Oh. Well, uh…”

“I guess I can use my nose,” Noctis snorted.

“I mean. Can you?” I was trying my best not to be rude with how I phrased that, but it was easier said than done. I had never been around someone so disabled before, and I was horrified at the thought of stepping on the toes Noctis couldn’t even feel.

“Uh. Let me...see...I guess,” Noctis said, leaning over to where the TV tray was positioned in front of him. Frowning, he hesitantly pecked at one of the keys, sighing when he saw a smash of letters appear on the screen. Pausing, he delicately stuck his tongue out and forcefully pressed the keys down that way. Precise, I thought as he typed a complete sentence onto the screen. Slow, but precise.

“So um. If there’s an emergency, just...press down on any key and hold it, ok? Just so a whole string of letters comes on screen, then I’ll know.”

“Okay.” Noctis said, his face wrinkled up. My keyboard probably didn’t taste very good. 

“And I’ll...I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay? Just try and...rest until then. I’ll set you up with everything, okay?”

Noctis nodded, not looking very confident. Hesitantly, I placed a hand on his shoulder.

“It’ll be okay.”

My words were there to reassure me as much as they were meant to assure Noctis. I really did hope things would be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't edit this, PLEASE...bear with me...Nakakon took a lot more out of me than I thought, my posting schedule may be a little delayed as I try and get things back on track!
> 
> But if y'all are curious about my Prompto cosplay...here's my Instagram:  
> https://www.instagram.com/meganeghost/
> 
> Also mmmm @ Noctis's clear PTSD...I have PTSD too, his reactions are based off my own so I'm not pulling this out of a hat...just dropping that as a disclaimer I guess. I dunno I feel the need to do that when I'm writing about certain stuff, it probably isn't required but...yknow. 
> 
> Me: been there, done that, now I'm writing about it...whatever


End file.
